Search

Oracle

This category contains 73 posts

Data Safety on a Budget

Posted byJeremy⋅October 4, 2025⋅Leave a comment

Many experienced DBAs joke that you can boil down the entire job to a single rule of thumb: Don’t lose your data. It’s simple, memorable, and absolutely true – albeit a little oversimplified. Mark Porter’s Cultural Hint “The Onion of our Requirements” conveys the same idea with a lot more accuracy: We need to always make sure we …Continue reading→

Default Sort Order in Db2, SQL Server, Oracle & Postgres 17

Posted byJeremy⋅May 22, 2024⋅Leave a comment

TLDR: I was starting to think that the best choice of default DB collation (for sort order, comparison, etc) in Postgres might be ICU. But after spending some time reviewing the landscape, I now think that code-point order is the best default DB collation – mirroring Db2 and Oracle – and linguistic sorting can be …Continue reading→

Understanding CPU on AIX Power SMT Systems

Posted byJeremy⋅July 1, 2016⋅6 Comments

This month I worked with a chicagoland company to improve performance for eBusiness Suite on AIX. I’ve worked with databases running on AIX a number of times over the years now. Nevertheless, I got thrown for a loop this week. TLDR: In the end, it came down to a fundamental change in resource accounting that …Continue reading→

Patching Time

Posted byJeremy⋅October 15, 2014

Just a quick note to point out that the October PSU was just released. The database has a few more vulnerabilities than usual (31), but they are mostly related to Java and the high CVSS score of 9 only applies to people running Oracle on windows. (On other operating systems, the highest score is 6.5.) …Continue reading→

Grid/CRS AddNode or runInstaller fails with NullPointerException

Posted byJeremy⋅August 8, 2014

Posting this here mostly to archive it, so I can find it later if I ever see this problem again. Today I was repeatedly getting this error while trying to add a node to a cluster: There were two notes on MOS related to NullPointerExceptions from runInstaller (which is used behind the scenes for addNode …Continue reading→

OSP: Overview

Posted byJeremy⋅October 31, 2013⋅1 Comment

This is the second of twelve articles in a series called Operationally Scalable Practices. You can read the introduction in the first article. In short, this series offers helpful suggestions for younger organizations and newer DBAs to best position them for very large-scale growth. Before getting into specifics, we will lay out a general overview …Continue reading→

Voting Disk Lies (CRS-4000)

Posted byJeremy⋅October 7, 2013

Add this to the category of annoyingly unhelpful error messages. I’m working on a mostly-automated process to create a new cluster by cloning another existing cluster. After running OUI (Oracle Universal Installer – called by config.sh to just run config assistants) there is a single ASM diskgroup which contains both the OCR and Voting Disk; …Continue reading→

How To Troubleshoot OEM 12c Cloud Control Auto-Discovery

Posted byJeremy⋅February 14, 2013

I was recently involved with an upgrade project to go from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 on an Exadata V2. We hit some snags during the upgrade specifically related to OEM 12c Cloud Control. We performed an out-of-place upgrade and OEM 12.1.0.1.0 had some difficulty in dealing with this. 12c Cloud Control is supposed to run a …Continue reading→

Set Up Exadata for Cloud Control 12.1.0.2

Posted byJeremy⋅January 9, 2013

I recently helped setup an Exadata X2-8 Database Machine with the latest version of OEM Cloud Countrol (12.1.0.2). A few documents do exist for this process – the most useful of which are the Exadata Discovery Cookbook and the Setup Automation Kit. However I found a few inconsistencies and problems; I think the existing documents …Continue reading→

Adaptive Log File Sync: Oracle, Please Don’t Do That Again

Posted byJeremy⋅October 19, 2012

The Summary Underscore parameter _use_adaptive_log_file_sync Default value changed in 11.2.0.3 from FALSE to TRUE Dynamic parameter Enables a new method of communication for LGWR to notify foreground processes of commit Old method used semaphores, LGWR had to explicitly “post” every waiting process New method has the FG processes sleep and “poll” to see if commit …Continue reading→

« Older posts

Disclaimer

This is my personal website. The views expressed here are mine alone and may not reflect the views of my employer.I am currently looking for consulting and/or contracting work in the USA around the oracle database ecosystem.

contact:312-725-9249 orschneider @ ardentperf.com